* Very important Indian language, well supported by university teaching institutions
* Suitable for independent and classroom-based learners at undergraduate level
* This book is an excellent grammar resource, which would appeal to a range of users including students and teachers of Hindi, as well as those with a general interest in languages and linguistics
* The book is well laid out for learners, and follows a meaningful structure in the order in which topics are introduced
* contains good examples in a clear Hindi font, supported by a very straightforward and uncomplicated transliteration system
Rama Kant Agnihotri retired as Professor and Head, Dept of Linguistics, University of Delhi. He received his D. Phil from the University of York (UK). He has lectured extensively in universities across the world and his previous publications among others include Second Language Acquisition: Socio-cultural and Linguistic Aspects of English in India (edited with A.L. Khanna, 1994), Hindi Morphology: A Word-based Description (with Rajendra Singh, 1997), Noam Chomsky: The Architecture of Language (edited with N. Mukherjee and B. N. Patnaik, 2001) and Being and Becoming Multilingual: Some Narratives (edited with Rajesh Sachdeva, 2022). He is currently Professor Emeritus at Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur.
Title: Hindi: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Essential Grammars)
Author: Agnihotri, Rama Kant
ISBN: 9781032163048
Binding:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publication Date: 2022-09-21
Number of Pages: 274
Weight: 0.5399 kg
The most appealing aspect of Agnihotri's grammar is its clear conception of its own objectives and functions. For speakers of Hindi, it is an exposition of the systematicity and rule-governed nature of their language; for learners of Hindi, it is an instrument to further the learning of the language. In its jargon-free description of the patterns of Hindi grammar, the volume doubles up as an introduction to modern grammatical analysis for anyone trying their hand at grammar construction. In doing so, it produces an analytical learner/speaker who is not merely a user of language, but also its student. (Kidwai 2007: 149)
Agnihotri's examples quite naturally draw on as wide a range of lexical resources and contexts that an average Hindi speaker would be expected to have access to. The accompanying observations on the conditions of use of the examples, and in the Appendix on Grammar in Context, is also particularly worthy of commendation, as they not only relieve the work of the usual accusations of prescriptivism that grammars typically attract, they also reveal to the reader how grammatical analysis enriches our understanding of the social and the symbolic. (Kidwai 2007: 150)
Prof Ayesha Kidwai, Professor of Linguistics at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
